Paste: "Quaran-Scenes: 'Cry to Me' and The Man from U.N.C.L.E."

- May 26, 2020

Quaran-Scenes: "Cry to Me" and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

By Kyle Turner | May 24, 2020 | 6:27pm

In Guy Ritchie’s 2015 The Man from U.N.C.L.E., when brick wall-esque KGB agent Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer) must keep an eye on his crucial contact/cover wife Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander) in an effort to track down her Nazi nuclear physicist father for both the KGB and CIA—with Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill) representing the Yanks—all of Gaby’s attempts at developing even a modicum of intimacy with the man are shut down. He’s not good at flirting, with women at least. In their hotel room, she’s left nursing a bottle and he stares at a chessboard, so keyed into a mode of professionalism it nearly renders him sexless. Sloshed, Gaby walks to her room, turns on the radio and tunes into Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me.”

“I’m going to finish this bottle,” Gaby says. “The only question is, are you going to help me or not?” It’s sexual bait, and Kuryakin isn’t biting. She turns on the radio, and, after a bit of static, the song comes on, cinematographer John Mathieson facing his camera directly at a fairly irritated (though trying to maintain face) Kuryakin. Behind him, slightly out of focus, Gaby slides into frame, vodka bottle in one hand and tumbler in the other, all the while donning sunglasses in her pajamas, like some sly nod to Tom Cruise. She doesn’t give a shit, and it’s infectious as she sways back and forth to the soulful sounds, her body free and her inhibitions out the window. Whether a game or not, her offer to know Kuryakin better, to maybe set him at ease, let him be himself in the relative privacy of this room, has been passed on. (Maybe it’s not her he wants to be vulnerable with…hmm? The pronoun confusion of the song certainly helps this reading: “When you’re all alone in your lonely room / And there’s nothing but the smell of her perfume.”)

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